1. Technical Field
The present invention is directed to an apparatus and method for performing surveillance prior to boot-up of an operating system. More particularly, the present invention is directed to an apparatus and method for providing error detection and an error message display prior to an operating system being loaded.
2. Description of Related Art
Most computing systems use some sort of surveillance to help detect system problems during operation of the computing system. Surveillance is a communication system between the operating system, e.g. Advanced Interactive executive (AIX), and a support system, e.g. a service processor. With typical surveillance, both the operating system and the support system send xe2x80x9cheartbeatxe2x80x9d messages to each other on a periodic basis. If either does not receive the heartbeat message from the other within a given period of time, it assumes that the other component has failed. As a result, the failure will be logged in a corresponding error log indicating that a repair action is necessary.
This method is fairly effective, assuming both the operating system and the service processor are running. However, early during a boot-up process, the operating system of the computing system is not running. Therefore, there is no surveillance to detect a failure of the service processor.
Therefore, it would be beneficial to have an apparatus and method for performing surveillance prior to boot-up of an operating system. It would further be advantageous to have an apparatus and method for providing error detection and error message display for errors occurring prior to boot-up of an operating system.
The present invention provides an apparatus and method for performing surveillance prior to boot-up of an operating system. The apparatus and method include an error detector that monitors a boot-up sequence of a support system for the occurrence of an error. If an error is detected, a unit check signal is output by the error detector. The unit check signal is received by either the support system or an error message output device and a corresponding error message is generated and output for use by a user of the computing system.